Argentina's stock market ended 2006 with an unprecedented yearly average increase of 35 percent which placed it among the world's top ten performers, the Argentine Institute for Capital Markets (IAMC, in its Spanish acronym), said in a report. Several other world markets also reached record highs.

The Maritime Front Joint Technical Commission (CTMFM) has set the summer ban for common hake (Merluccius hubbsi) in the common fishing zone (CFZ) shared by Argentina and Uruguay, between 1 January and 31 march 2007.

In an effort to offset expected shortages in diesel fuel supplies, the Argentine government has announced a project to build a refinery that will require an about 2.3-billion-dollar investment which will be mainly made by some 30 private oil companies, with the exception of Royal/Dutch Shell, which is engaged in a dispute with the administration.

Public advertising of tobacco in Buenos Aires City has been banned as from the first day of 2007, under municipal law 1799 passed in late 2005, amid a drive to curb smoking-related illnesses in Argentina that according the national government kill 40,000 people a year.

While the government praised it as reinstating certainty, some savers saw it as the end of a nightmare and banks continue mum and mulling its possible implications, law experts said that the Supreme Court ruling that ordered banks on Wednesday to reimburse savers in pesos dollar deposits frozen during Argentina's 2001 economic debacle, was fairly reasonable.

The planned purchase by Standard Bank ÃÂ¢€ South Africa's largest private bank by assets ÃÂ¢€ of most of US' Bank of America Corp.'s BankBoston Argentina assets, marks the first large investment by a foreign player in the sector since Argentina's 2001-2002 economic meltdown, and an attention call for competitors, banking sources told MercoPress.

Minutes after Argentine President Nestor Kirchner ended a national address saying he will not be blackmailed by paramilitary groups that allegedly have kidnapped clue witnesses in human rights trials, one of them appeared safe and sound.

Five years later and in a long-awaited ruling, the Argentine Supreme Court ordered local banks to reimburse in full their customers savings that were frozen during the economic crisis of 2001/02, when Argentina also defaulted on its foreign debt.

Argentine fisheries exports (sea and fluvial; fresh and processed) during the first ten months of 2006 totaled 510.223 tons representing over a billion US dollars, according to the latest report from Senasa, Agro-food Health and Quality Service